One of the most remarkable women in history, Joan of Arc, has long been at the center of various conversations and controversies because, while no one can deny her significance, the meaning of her words and actions eludes easy explanation.
Was she, as Shakespeare cast her, a witch? Were her visions heretical, as church leaders at the time concluded, or was she the saint the later Catholic Church canonized? What do we make of her commitment to a shining chastity and her insistence on her physical virginity? How should we interpret the rationale for wearing men’s clothing while leading armies into battle? Was she a reluctant warrior who wished for an ordinary life or an ambitious girl who desired the spotlight? What do we learn from her martyrdom?
In First Things, Dan Hitchens reflects on recent attempts to enlist Joan of Arc for the LGBT+ cause. Many today want to reimagine her as a nonconforming, prototransgender revolutionary. Hitchens reclaims Joan for a conservative and biblical understanding of sex and gender, as opposed to the cultural trend that makes her a founder of trans identity.
The questions about Joan of Arc’s life and legacy fascinate me, but they go beyond my purpose here. Instead, I want to lean on Hitchens’s description of the most important yet often unnoticed contradictions at the heart of today’s transgender theories. He believes one of the transgender movement’s most remarkable achievements has been to conceal the internal division at the heart of gender theory. “There is no single trans narrative,” he says. There are two, “wholly incompatible and mutually destructive, which have somehow been fused into a single, all-conquering cause.”
‘Wrong Body’ Narrative
Here’s how Hitchens describes the first narrative:
The first narrative holds that there are two realities, maleness and femaleness, and that some people are tragically exiled from their true states. Jan Morris, in the opening lines of the only trans memoir written by an acknowledged master of English prose, puts it like this: “I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” This kind of story is compelling at an emotional level: It speaks to the universal feeling of dislocation, of alienation, of longing for completeness, and at the same time resonates with the hope of the oppressed for justice, with the sorrows of every human being denied true flourishing by prejudice and fear.
‘What Is Truth?’ Narrative
Here’s how Hitchens describes the second narrative:
The second narrative is one of radical doubt, one that asks whether maleness and femaleness are, in fact, real. It queries whether the kaleidoscopic diversity of human self-experience really can be squeezed into so restrictive a binary; it contends that language is always conditioned by the power structures of the day, that it rarely grasps life as it is actually lived; and it concludes that ultimately—to quote the very same memoir by Jan Morris—“there is neither man nor woman.” This is the skeptical trans narrative which, of course, demolishes the “wrong body” one. If the ultimate reality has no place for gender, then Morris’s original epiphany was false: To “realize” that one has been “born into the wrong body” must be, not realization, but illusion.
Why These Narratives Are Incompatible
It doesn’t take long to recognize the internal inconsistency between these two narratives. The first depends on maleness and femaleness being something real, for a binary must exist for it to be transgressed or transcended. The second questions reality altogether, falling for a radical skepticism that reimagines the world in terms of linguistic power plays.
It’s no surprise to see debates arise over speech nowadays. If you refuse to acquiesce to someone’s preferred pronouns, you run afoul of the first narrative because you seem to be imposing something objective on someone’s subjective experience. You also run afoul of the second narrative because, if all reality is linguistically constructed, your failure to follow the new rules will keep the new theories from appearing true.
This is why it’s not enough for someone to self-identify in a certain way; everyone must echo and affirm that person’s self-identification too. As Abigail Favale points out, “If gender identity only exists in language, our language must be manipulated, or else the whole thing falls apart. This is what’s at stake in the battle over pronouns: our understanding of reality itself.”
Open Your Heart, but Close Your Eyes
I was recently perusing Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a resource book written by and for “the transgender community,” and I was struck by how often and how seamlessly the authors alternated between the “wrong body” narrative and the “what is truth” narrative.
In the introduction, there are no fewer than eight ways of “being trans,” including everything from merely adopting an alter ego to trying to escape “the binary poles of gender” or rejecting the medical community and the whole idea of a “gender destination.”
“There are so many, many ways of being us,” the book says, before offering one piece of advice for allies: “Let love prevail. Open your heart, and see what happens.”
The problem with this advice, of course, is that it requires us to close our eyes to the internal contradictions that erase the meaning and significance of manhood and womanhood. It redefines love as the embrace of illogicality and as the denial of reality. It reinterprets history through an ideological lens, so even a Catholic saint gets culturally appropriated for a cause she would have abhorred.
In today’s controversies over transgender theories, opening your heart requires closing your mind.
